DODGEgallery is pleased to present What is Yours is Mine, an exhibition of new work by Environmental Services. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery.
Owner/Operator, Doug Weathersby, founded Environmental Services (ES) upon completing graduate school as a means to be both financially stable and as a promise to himself to create art on a daily basis. For $40/hour (three hour minimum) ES will do anything from installing your art to forming a compost pile in your back yard to painting your house, all the while creating art through photographs, temporary installations, and the reconfiguration of accumulated materials. At its core, Weathersby’s practice is collaborative as he openly responds to a given context. Often exhibiting images or detritus from various job sites, he forms entire shows based on his multidisciplinary practice.
For What is Yours is Mine, Weathersby presents sculptures, photographs and an installation documenting the past six months of a major collaborative undertaking: a series of studio visits and exchanges with artists who have exhibited at DODGEgallery—Dave Cole, Taylor Davis, Darren Blackstone Foote, Sheila Gallagher, Eddie Martinez, Jason Middlebrook and Cordy Ryman. Commencing with a solicitation to each artist, Weathersby sent out an invitation describing the project (see attached). During each visit, Weathersby learned about the artist and their practice, photographically documented their spaces and collected scraps and discards from the studio. In return, he offered to perform a task that would be helpful to the artist he visited; be it delivering art or cleaning up their space. Regardless of what he was given, Weatherbsy abided by one rule: he must use everything that he recovered from each studio in What is Yours is Mine. This unwanted detritus composes the bizarre sculptures and the large dumpster-like structure fabricated and installed on site.
Weathersby plays with the notion of authorship; the exhibition is composed of both the recognizable materials of another artist’s practice to those that are now, subject to his hand, completely abstracted. Appropriation and authorship are heavily churned concepts in contemporary art from Rauschenberg’s Erased a deKooning Drawing to Martha Rosler’s Meta-Monumental Garage Sale; both of which are examples of working with a finished artist’s product and questioning the methods of artistic practice. Weathersby, however, employs true collaboration, receiving chosen materials from another artist, rather than commandeering. In addition, he is working with the scraps of another’s artistic process and turning them into a completed piece by his own hand.
Hanging on the walls are various Daily Log photos from the project. Since 2010, Weathersby has been documenting, daily, his activities with a singular photograph and posting it on Facebook. Text carefully positioned over the images, allows for insight into the artist’s innermost thoughts, his to-do list, his whereabouts and financials. The images are striking, offering a perspective into the way he examines the world. The logs provide a narrative for the show, documenting both the visits to the studio and the creation of the sculptures. An essential part of Weathersby’s practice, the logs are both the factual grounding to the exhibition and the critical tie revealing a window into his world.
Doug Weathersby received his BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1995, and his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in 2002. Weathersby is the Owner/Operator of Environmental Services. In 2003, he received the ICA Artist Prize and a LEF Foundation Grant. Weathersby was the 2012 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Painting Fellowship and the 2011 Berkshire Taconic A.R.T. Grant. In 2010, Weathersby received a grant from Flux Projects, Atlanta, GA, and executed a public installment of his Paint Shed project. He has exhibited at various institutions including Rose Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Art Interactive, Massachusetts College of Art, Babson College, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Video Art Foundation, Barcelona, and Socrates Sculpture Park. Weathersby's work is included in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Permanent Collection, and has been reviewed in international publications including Art Papers, Art Lies, Sculpture Magazine, and Tema Celeste.
↧
Doug Weathersby - DODGE Gallery - January 12th 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
↧